Latest news with #ÉcoleNormaleSupérieure
Hindustan Times
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
This world leader is a math genius with 2 Olympiad gold medals, PhD from Paris
Before entering the political arena, Nicușor Dan was already making headlines - not in parliament, but in the world of mathematics. The 55-year-old won a tense rerun of Romania's presidential election on Sunday, beating nationalist George Simion. While he has made the news as the president elect of Romania, not many people know that Nicușor Dan is a math prodigy who has won gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad twice. According to the International Math Olympiad website, Dan won the gold medal in the tournament in 1987 and 1988. He managed to get the maximum total score of 42 points both years. His back-to-back wins came when he was still in high school, a period during which Romania consistently ranked among the top-performing nations at the IMO. After his Olympiad triumphs, he went on to study mathematics at the University of Bucharest and later at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris - one of France's most prestigious academic institutions. Nicușor Dan, currently serving as the Mayor of Bucharest, holds a master's degree from École Normale Supérieure and a PhD from Paris 13 University. After returning to Romania from Paris, Dan became a civil activist and eventually pivoted to politics. He campaigned on a slogan of change in the Romanian presidential election, saying he wants to "rebuild" the eastern European country. According to an AFP report, the former math prodigy gained 54 percent compared to 46 percent by nationalist George Simion, who had topped the May 4 first round of voting in the EU and NATO member bordering war-torn Ukraine. Dan, who was an activist fighting illegal urban development before becoming mayor, told jubilant supporters gathered in a Bucharest park that Romania's "reconstruction" would begin on Monday, calling it "a moment of hope".
Gizmodo
05-05-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
Cuttlefish Seem to ‘Wave' at Each Other, but What They're Saying Is Still a Mystery
Researchers just spotted cunning cuttlefish waving to one another with their tentacles, a previously unobserved behavior that pushes the boundaries of the creature's intelligence. Cuttlefish—sometimes referred to as the 'chameleons of the sea'—are renowned for their camouflage abilities. In other cephalopods, that color-changing capacity is also used for communication. And like other cephalopods, namely octopuses, cuttlefish are quite intelligent. The cuttlefish's apparent waving behavior reveals a new aspect of their sophistication, and opens up a new avenue for researchers to investigate their smarts using machine learning. The team's research is not yet peer-reviewed, and is hosted on the preprint server bioRxiv. In its research, the team studied four different arm movements in two cuttlefish species, S. officinalis and S. bandensis. The researchers recorded videos of animals signing and played them back to the 'cuttlefish participants,' who waved back at the displays. The team also flipped the video in some playbacks, revealing that the cuttlefish were more likely to wave when the video was played upright. The cuttlefish had four different signs, dubbed 'up,' 'side,' 'roll,' and 'crown.' As for the meaning of the arm waves, the jury remains out. The researchers wrote that the signs could be domination signs, as after a cuttlefish waved, other cuttlefish tended to withdraw. But the signals could also be courtship displays—though the signs were also made by juvenile cuttlefish that were not yet sexually mature. Other possibilities remain: The signs could be aversive displays, made in defensive contexts, or exhibit internal states such as mood in the animals. 'The most plausible interpretation is that these signs are symbolic and can encrypt a variety of possible meanings depending on the associated behavioral contexts,' the team wrote. But the arm waves themselves are not the whole story. 'In addition to their visually striking display, arm wave signs produce mechanical waves in the water, prompting us to explore the possibility that they may also be perceived via mechanoreception,' the team wrote. In other words, even when the animals could not see one another underwater, they could feel the vibrational waves produced by the arm movements of the other participants. 'Using playback experiments similar to those adopted in vision, we obtained preliminary evidence to support this hypothesis, indicating that arm wave signs may represent multimodal signals involving vision and mechanoreception,' the group added. Cuttlefish are bright; previous research indicated the animals are capable of waiting for a reward when there's a promise of a bigger payout. The animals are able to plan for the future, which previously was thought to be a behavior only exhibited in mammals and birds. The researchers, including first author Sophie Cohen-Bodénès from Perceptual Systems Laboratory at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in France, added that machine learning algorithms could be applied to similar data to better understand how the animals dished out different arm signals depending on the stimuli. Similar work has been done with sperm whale click data with stunning success—researchers recently managed to identify specific patterns of speech in the animals' communiques, and roughly assemble their 'alphabet.' Cuttlefish's intelligence, reasoning, and behavior remains enigmatic, but the new research indicates that the animals have plenty more secrets to decipher.
Scientific American
05-05-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
Cuttlefish May Communicate with Discolike Arm Gestures
Cuttlefish wave their expressive arms in four distinctive dancelike signals—potentially letting them communicate visually and by vibration. These marine invertebrates, which have eight sucker-lined 'arms' and two tentacles near their mouth, can alter their body's color patterns to blend in with the background or create zebralike stripes to attract a mate. Some have been known to raise their arms to intimidate predators or to extend their fourth arm to signal a desire to mate. But cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Cohen-Bodénès and computational modeler Peter Neri, both then at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, noticed cuttlefish doing something that hadn't been described before: making specific, repeated and relatively complex arm gestures at each other. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Studying two species, common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) and dwarf cuttlefish (Sepia bandensis), the two researchers have identified four arm-waving signs, which they call 'up,' 'side,' 'roll' and 'crown.' The scientists recently posted their observations in a paper on the preprint server bioRxiv. The 'up' sign involves cuttlefish extending one pair of their arms upward as if swim dancing to the Bee Gees song 'Stayin' Alive' while twisting their other arms together in the middle. For the 'side' sign, the animals bring all their arms to one side of their body or the other. The 'roll' sign involves cuttlefish folding all their arms beneath their head (making their eyes bulge out), as if they are about to do a front flip. And the 'crown' sign is rather like when a person puts the fingertips of both of their hands together to form a pyramid shape. Cohen-Bodénès and Neri recorded cuttlefish signing in different contexts and played the videos back to other individual cuttlefish. 'We found that when they see [others] signing, the cuttlefish sign back,' Cohen-Bodénès says. 'We don't think it's a mimicking signal because when they sign back, they sometimes display different types of signs.' This suggests a possible communication signal, Neri adds. The researchers also used a hydrophone—a device used to record sounds underwater—to capture the vibrations each sign created in the water. They then played those vibrations back to cuttlefish that couldn't see the signs but could feel the water pressure changes—and the cuttlefish still responded with their own signs. This is the first piece of evidence that cuttlefish might communicate with one another by emitting specific vibrational signals, Cohen-Bodénès says. Cuttlefish may detect these signals with saclike sense organs called statocysts or an array of sensory cells running along the skin similar to the lateral line system used by fish. The researchers 'have found some fascinating behaviors,' says Willa Lane, a marine biologist and psychologist at the University of Cambridge, who says she has seen the crown behavior in cuttlefish in her lab. She finds it particularly compelling that the arm movements are present in two species. Because the species Cohen-Bodénès and Neri studied don't overlap in their geographic ranges, and because cuttlefish are quite solitary, Lane wonders if the signals might be used during hunting to confuse prey or to scare off predators—or even as part of interactive hunting with other species, a behavior that has been observed in octopuses. 'It's interesting that they communicate visually and maybe acoustically,' says Sam Reiter, a neuroethologist at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan. He and Neri agree that before this behavior can technically be called a 'sign language,' researchers must show the signals' distinct meanings in particular contexts. Still, the signals do add to the evidence of how smart cuttlefish are. 'In terms of intelligence, they are, in my view, very much comparable to octopuses,' Cohen-Bodénès says.
New European
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Everyday Philosophy: The myth of the lone genius
To date he has published an impressive number of maths textbooks and become an internationally respected scholar, famous for his work on set theory and functional analysis. But Bourbaki doesn't exist and never has done. He's a fictional professor invented by a group of French mathematicians who published under this pseudonym. Their successors are still going strong. Or rather, Bourbaki is. Nicolas Bourbaki was a Greek mathematician who later made a living playing cards in Parisian cafes. By the 1950s he had an office with his name on the door at the elite École Normale Supérieure. They named their avatar Bourbaki in honour of a prank by a student at the École Normale Supérieure some years earlier. He had appeared in disguise in a lecture theatre and written some complex symbols on the board, which he had labelled 'Theorem of Bourbaki' and asked the students to provide a proof for it. What he'd written was nonsense, a soup of mathematical signs. This was a spoof of the complex and very abstract mathematics then in vogue. I learned about Bourbaki from a recent talk by Snezana Lawrence, author of the just-published A Little History of Mathematics. What a great story. Apparently, members of the Bourbaki collective are obliged to retire at 50, so today none of the original members are still active – but there's continuity in their successors' mission to give clear expositions of the latest mathematical developments and to keep French mathematics on the international map. In an important sense, Bourbaki is still Bourbaki. More recently, a group of Italian artists and writers have used the pseudonym Luther Blissett (a moniker borrowed from a Watford FC footballer) to hide, to some degree, who they are and produce group works as if from a single source. Notably, four of them wrote the bestselling novel Q (first published in Italian in 1999) under this nom de plume. In the UK, Nicci French is the pseudonym used by the husband-and-wife thriller-writing partnership of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. Many of Nicci French's readers have no idea that books such as Blue Monday and Killing Me Softly were jointly authored. When we see something that's well-crafted it's very tempting to assume that it was designed by one person. But that tendency can lead us astray. It was from this pattern of thinking that André Bazin's auteur theory emerged in cinema studies in the 1940s. Great films, Bazin suggested, were the products of the shaping intellect of a brilliant director. Actors, cinematographers, runners, all make their contribution, but the director is a kind of God who creates the film ex nihilo and can rightly take the applause for the result since he or she (ideally) has ultimate responsibility for everything in the final cut. The same kind of thinking is behind a traditional argument for the existence of a unique all-powerful God, the so-called Argument from Design. Consider a natural phenomenon such as the human eye: it seems to have been put together by a being of great intelligence who wanted to create an organ for sight (for this argument to work you need to ignore some conspicuous design flaws, such as the eye's tendency to develop myopia). Presumably the designer of the human eye was God – who else would have been capable of it? This argument is meant to demonstrate the existence of a unique God with remarkable powers. Before 1859, when Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species, that still had some plausibility as an explanation for the cause of apparent design. But as long ago as the mid-18th century, David Hume had made the point that even if you were to accept that reasoning, you couldn't be sure from it that a single all-powerful God existed. Wise people proportion their beliefs to the evidence available. For Hume, it was clear that many great human creations are the product of teams of people working together. It's just as likely, then, that the human eye, and every other apparently designed aspect of reality, were the work of a team of lesser gods, Hume thought, as that they were created by a single supreme being with a master plan. Apparent design doesn't prove monotheism. The moral of this is that when you encounter something impressive, don't assume it is the work of one genius. A team of lesser mortals (or deities) working together, or even the impersonal effects of natural selection, can produce amazing results – often more amazing than could have been achieved by acting alone.
The Guardian
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Possibility of Tenderness by Jason Allen-Paisant review
Go these days to any independent bookshop or art gallery or zine fair, and you may find yourself asking: where are the humans? Title after title is devoted to clay and stone, trees and flowers, the riverine and the botanical, gardens and allotments. Some volumes are philosophical, others urgent calls for climate justice. They share a vocabulary: care, tending, grounding, rootedness, nourishment, regeneration. Nature, however battered, is held up as an antidote to morbid modernity, its alienations, its amnesia. The Possibility of Tenderness is also about nature, its setting Coffee Grove in the May Day Mountains of Jamaica. During Jason Allen-Paisant's early childhood there, it had no electricity or piped water. Neither beach idyll nor Trenchtown ghetto, its personality was shaped in large part by 'grung' – the local name for small plots cultivated by peasant farmers. Apples, guava, mangoes: here, for all the sweat and toil, was succulence. And memories of feeling connected – to the ground, to the past, to kinfolk. 'In 'soil',' Jennifer Kabat has written, 'I hear other words: soul and social.' Education was Allen-Paisant's passport. He moved away – to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Later Oxford. He didn't shed his past entirely, though: a study of Martiniquais poet Aimé Césaire was subtitled Thinking With Spirits; a volume of his own poems was called Thinking With Trees. Returning to Jamaica from Leeds where he lives, his new book attempts to think with Coffee Grove. This involves deep time: it emerged from the ocean, a bed of limestone, more than 15m years ago. Slavery, understood in environmental terms, sculpts and embeds itself in the landscape, too. If there's a dominant figure it's Keturah, the author's grandmother, who converted to the Church of God, married a man much older than her and, when their relationship fell apart, moved to the Grove with her young daughter. She was upright, a 'de facto administrator for the village, a sort of mayor'. She looked after Allen-Paisant when he was young, carrying him up the hill to the Mount Pleasant postal agency she ran. It was a modest shack, but to the knee-high boy it seemed much more solid and grand than that. His grown-up self, back to plant his own daughters' umbilical cords in the earth, wants to know and tell us more about her. He talks to locals, goes on mini-treks with herbalist Rastas, pores over old maps in local archives. No clear story emerges. In its absence are riffs – on the difference between a vision and a dream, the ubiquity of tombs, the frequency with which hillside people speak about the dead, what he claims is the absence of the term 'forest' in the local vernacular. Walking especially fascinates him as it allows him to smell and to hear the countryside with an almost tactile acuteness. He even remembers how his grandmother, like many who lived in the Grove, 'would walk with one arm gripping the other behind her back'. By his own telling, Allen-Paisant hasn't spent a lot of time in Jamaica in recent decades. One of the things about grung life that he now responds to – its smallness, so different from industrial-scale agriculture – is what led him to leave in the first place. It would take longer than the few weeks he's able to spend in Coffee Grove to be able to offer more than skin-deep insights into its present state For a poet his prose can be surprisingly slack. (A house has 'a kind of aliveness'; subterranean stories exert 'a special kind of fascination' on him). It combines wellness-platform peppiness (endless swooning about 'beauty' and 'joy') with lurches into grandiosity (trying to evoke the time that has passed since slavery, he declares, 'I am reminded of some lines I wrote in a prose poem'). A fondness for lectern-isms leads to silly overstatements such as 'Europeans have all sorts of marble structures, columns, statues, monuments, temples to the glory of their history'. Allen-Paisant's heart is in the right place, and there are passages that prickle and sing, but The Possibility of Tenderness is too self-conscious, groomed and full of box-ticking invocations of grace/embodiment/connection to fully realise that possibility. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican memoir of plants and dreams is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
